Orphic Paris, Part XIV

I love the story of Apollo, which is the story of a god born in a child’s body, and of his growth and learning. In 1928, the choreographer George Balanchine made a dance for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes that retells the Greek myth. It opened at the Théâtre Sarah-Bernhardt, in Paris, and was a turning point in Balanchine’s career, though he was only twenty-four. In his revised version, three muses—Calliope (poetry), Polyhymnia (mime), and Terpsichore (dance)—teach Apollo what there is to know. Not surprisingly, the muse of dance gives him the most, and the two perform a pas de deux (literally “step of two”). Like Apollo, the muses are the children of Zeus, so his education is led by his half-sisters. It is one of the only Balanchine ballets in which a male dancer is highlighted, and every male dancer aspires to it. Balanchine liked speed, but men don’t have this, so in his ballets the male dancers usually support the women in the company, who have small faces, long necks, little heads, longish arms, and even longer legs. Balanchine loved tall dancers—elongated and stretched out—because there is much more of them to see.

Once, at Lincoln Center, I sat behind a former principal dancer who long ago was the foremost interpreter of the role of Apollo. Now he is an old man, and it was moving to see the young Apollo onstage discreetly acknowledge him in the front row during the curtain calls. In the ballet, there are two solos. In the first, Apollo is childish and playful, but starting to carry himself in a strong way; in the second, he is no longer so light and airy. There is a moment, after he has been shown knowledge from each of his half-sisters, when he becomes an adult. Throughout the ballet, there is a rawness of movement that expresses emotion, yet all of it seems to be anchored in a classical ballet vocabulary.

Photograph Courtesy Paul Kolnik

Sometimes, I wonder if a dancer’s emotions are as important as calculated movements, because even when the choreography is abstract I sense a story—two figures seek each other out; a man searches for his ideal partner; when he finds her, they dance together, but then he loses her. “Don’t think, dear, do,” Balanchine said to his dancers, borrowing from Paul Valéry’s poem “Sketch of a Serpent,” in which he writes, “Dance, dear body, don’t think!” In “Apollo,” I see imitative scenes from life, in part because the music makes me aware of time expressing form, though each time I see the ballet I come away with a different plot, which is the one the dancers inspire in one another, combining the classical past with the nervous anxiety of the present. “Dancers are just flowers, and flowers grow without any literal meaning, they are just beautiful,” Balanchine said. “A flower doesn’t tell you a story.” But even in the most abstract speech, there is something communicated, and this is true for poetry and for ballet, too. Still, a ballet is under no obligation to reveal transparent narrative or meaning—two figures dancing together is enough, metamorphosing the rigid movements of imperial dance into something more supple and pliant. “I don’t create, I just assemble,” Balanchine said, and this is exactly how I feel while I am assembling language into poetry. There isn’t inspiration, there’s just work.

In “Apollo,” there’s also Stravinsky’s neoclassical score—playful and solemn—for string instruments, an audacious orchestration with an abrasive rhythmic structure. Referring to the music, Balanchine wrote, “It seemed to tell me that I could dare not to use everything, that I, too, could eliminate.” There are thirty-nine Balanchine ballets set to music by Stravinsky, whom Balanchine revered as a genius. Recalling their first meeting, in 1925, Balanchine said, “Stravinsky was the greatest comfort I ever had.” He really enjoyed cooking for Stravinsky and said that he could always “cook him out of a bad mood.”

There are so many things I love in the great modernist “Apollo”: the narration stripped down to tone and feeling (as in a fine lyric poem); the pristine white (ballet blanc), lyrically spare costumes (Apollo’s toga with a diagonal cut) and staging (Balanchine doesn’t have sets, he has non-sets); the bent, turned-in, weighted-to-the-floor modern movements. When I last saw the New York City Ballet perform the piece, its beauty still seemed radical to me. Watching the child-man becoming a god, I felt as if Keats’s sun god were greeting me.

Wandering through the Louvre today, I came upon the Archaic torso of Apollo that Rilke made the subject of an intense sonnet written in German, which was published in 1908. The great spectacle of Paris, with all its harsh modernity, had begun to work a change on Rilke, and he was trying to bring a new vocabulary to his poems, writing not about his own abstract ideas and moods but instead about concrete things apart from himself that had to be seen and understood—a panther in a cage, blue hydrangeas, a broken sculpture of a torso. Rilke’s apprenticeship with the sculptor Rodin (in whose studio he worked) must have influenced him, too.

Rilke is one of the most popular foreign-language poets in the English-speaking world, even more highly esteemed here than in Germany. His most recent translators render his poems into English in an unrhymed, loose vernacular style that sounds very much like contemporary American poetry descended from William Carlos Williams. Though it’s not possible to judge poetry translated from a foreign language, I am able to describe the impression a new version has on me. In “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” we have the message imparted by the sensuous, broken torso of Apollo and the poet’s apprehension of it.

It is an ekphrastic poem (a poem about a visual work of art), in which the poet describes an ancient fragment of a statue, whose arms, legs, head, and genitals are missing, leaving the poet to imagine how the statue might have looked and why it seems more real in its damaged state—so real, in fact, that the marble torso is transformed by art into something nearly spiritual that addresses the reader in the final line, proclaiming, “You must change your life.”

The poem begins with a statement of fact: that the observer cannot know what the missing head of the Greek statue looked like. Here are three translated versions of the poem’s first sentence:

“Never will we know his fabulous head / where the eyes’ apples slowly ripened.” (C. F. MacIntyre)

“We never knew his stupendous head / in which the eye-apples ripened.” (Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann)

The remainder of the sonnet contemplates the statue’s torso, and the translations differ from each other even more as the poem proceeds.

“But / His torso still glows like a candelabrum / In which his gaze only turned low, / Holds and gleams.” (M. D. Herter Norton)

“And yet his torso /is still suffused with brilliance from inside, /like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, / gleams in all its power.” (Stephen Mitchell)

“—yet something here keeps you in view, /as if his look had sunk inside / and still blazed on.” (Don Paterson)

Is the torso a lamp, a candelabrum, or neither? Does the torso gleam or blaze? Is the light turned low or sunk inside? Was the absent head legendary, fabulous, or stupendous? Were the eyes ripening fruit or eye-apples? Should the tense be present, past, or future? I think it is impossible to attempt a close reading of a poem in a language one doesn’t know. But what is plain is that the defaced sculpture has agency. And the poem is about the effect the imperfect classical statue has on the beholder, who must change his or her life as a result of a direct human response to it.

In Paris, there are endless encounters with the principles associated with Apollonian beauty—order, rationality, harmony, restraint—reminding us of the remarkable civilization of Greece, rather than something darker, lacking discipline, unbridled, violent. Does this make Paris more human, more truthful, more fragile, more tragic? Surely, these two forces—the Apollonian and the Dionysian—must be reconciled for us to be content in our lives.

This morning, I pondered this when I happened upon a two-room gallery of prints by Renaissance and Baroque masters. Many of the images were exquisite, anatomical sketches of the male body, which perhaps explains the gallery’s location at a medical school. Roaming through the long corridors of the college afterward, I happened upon a little museum of anatomy, a vast, dusty hall lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves displaying fragments of the human skeleton. After the serene Old Masters, it was a sobering, grotesque spectacle. Here, instead, was a godless, unsentimental coroner’s laboratory. In one corner was shelf after shelf of jars containing fetuses floating in sickly-sweet-smelling formaldehyde. The human skin was bleached white, and the open eyes shone a perfect sapphire blue. Afterward, out on the street, I felt chastened, and Paris seemed to tilt beneath me, the bright sun penetrating my dark glasses.

Henri Cole teaches at Claremont McKenna College. His most recent book is “Nothing to Declare.” He recently received the Award of Merit in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.